Shock Therapy

When he was a toddler, Andy Alden would come home from a movie and play its theme on his toy piano. By the time he was 6, he was performing his own songs. At the same age, Tim Callobre was also making up piano tunes. Soon, he was branching out to other instruments and entering composition contests. In second grade, Saad Haddad did a report on Mozart. "I thought it was cool that this guy was producing good stuff when he was 3," he says.

The return of John Carpenter to feature filmmaking after a 10-year absence should be cause for shivery rejoicing, but "The Ward" is bland shock therapy from the guy who reinvented bloody peek-a-boo with the classic "Halloween. " All the elements seemed to be in place for another one of his claustrophobically sublime and ridiculous portraits of siege mentality, a la "Assault on Precinct 13" and "The Thing. " But this '60s-era tale set in a Victorian-designed mental institution — in which young Tippi Hedren-blond amnesiac Kristen (Amber Heard)

Thank you for your excellent article "A New Image for Shock Therapy." There has been a need for the public to be brought up to date on this subject. It could change so many miserable lives. The use of the new ECT has helped so many people, especially the elderly with severe depression who didn't respond to medication or other kinds of therapy. My mother, 81, and my brother, 51, had stopped being part of society. (With ECT) they have regained their enthusiasm for life. NAME WITHHELD Costa Mesa

They used to call it "Edison's medicine" or, with a touch of gallows humor, a "Georgia Power cocktail" ? the practice of hooking mentally troubled patients up to an electrical current and jolting them until they went into convulsions. Pioneered in the late 1930s, electroshock therapy, as it was more commonly known, was a scientifically crude practice that often left patients dazed and disoriented, sometimes with broken bones. For many it became a symbol of the callousness that often characterized the treatment of the mentally ill. But that was then.

The country's largest professional group of psychiatrists announced elaborate guidelines Thursday for the use of electroshock therapy, the controversial treatment for severe depression that is experiencing a resurgence in medical practice. The guidelines drawn up by the American Psychiatric Assn. were described as among the most detailed ever issued to explain how a therapy should be used--testament to rapid advances in the science of shock therapy and to public pressure for accountability.

Don't get the wrong idea from titles such as "The Cervix Banger" or "Yams"--the latter a show in which performance artist Karen Finley smeared liverwurst, ice cream and canned yams all over her body during a monologue about a grandmother being abused by her grandson. The media, Finley says, play up the shock value of her work because it makes a good read; such elements are actually just a small fraction of what she does and are usually there to make emotional or political points.

Electroshock therapy, the controversial psychiatric treatment that led to the removal of Sen. Thomas F. Eagleton as the 1972 Democratic vice presidential nominee, received a limited endorsement Wednesday from a federal advisory panel, which said that the procedure can be "life-saving" for certain persons suffering the most severe forms of depression.

Fifty years after its introduction--and five years after voters in Berkeley tried to ban it--there are still few controversies in psychiatry more polarizing than the question of whether electricity should be used to induce seizures to treat depression. Critics of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) say that, even when used properly, it causes brain damage and works only by confusing patients so they can't remember why they were depressed.

Farce can't get much blacker than Joe Orton's "Loot," which opened Saturday at South Coast Repertory in a revival on the Second Stage. Mordant wisecracks aimed at every form of authority from the Pope to the police--not to mention the absurdities of a plot involving a defiled corpse and a bumbled bank robbery--are meant to shock the audience as much as to make it laugh.

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, acknowledging that workers' "patience is at its limit," promised Wednesday that there will be no "shock therapy" to pull the country out of its economic crisis and that the people will be consulted before consumer prices are raised. "Your cries of alarm are reaching us," Gorbachev told angry factory workers in Sverdlovsk, a major industrial center in the Ural Mountains, where he arrived on a trip aimed at calming fears about planned economic reforms.

Britain is about to undergo an extreme makeover. And Festus Grant is worried. The 71-year-old was crippled by a stroke early this year, and he doesn't know how he would have coped without the "angel of mercy" who knocked on his door a few days after he came home to his modest flat after three months in the hospital. The care worker from the Stroke Assn. helped him piece his life back together. She arranged follow-up trips to the doctor and signed him up for a shuttle service that takes him shopping once a week.

The American Psychiatric Assn. , which labored to bring forth a revision of psychiatry's “Bible” earlier this year, has just released a more modest opus likely to generate much discussion among mental health professionals. With the release on Friday of its “Practice Guideline for Treatment of Patients with Major Depressive Disorder,” the nation's leading psychiatric association makes a number of subtle adjustments to its past treatises on depression and its treatment. The new guideline is the first comprehensive update of the organization's guidelines for depression treatment since 2000.

Dan Glidden hit the brakes on his Aspen Police Department hybrid SUV. The evidence of wrongdoing was scattered all over the street. Piles of soiled paper and plastic wrap. A torn plastic coffee cup. An empty ketchup bottle. And, lying on the curb, an overturned garbage bin with one of its two hatches hanging open. Glidden began to search for the lawbreaker -- not the bear who had knocked over the Dumpster in search of goodies, but the person who had failed to secure the lid against what has become a nightly incursion in this ritzy mountain resort.

When he was a toddler, Andy Alden would come home from a movie and play its theme on his toy piano. By the time he was 6, he was performing his own songs. At the same age, Tim Callobre was also making up piano tunes. Soon, he was branching out to other instruments and entering composition contests. In second grade, Saad Haddad did a report on Mozart. "I thought it was cool that this guy was producing good stuff when he was 3," he says.

Some California lawmakers and corrections officials are breathing a sigh of relief over the ouster of Robert Sillen, the special administrator charged with repairing the healthcare system in the state's 33 prisons. They should know better. Sillen was confrontational -- a bully, even -- but that's exactly what was called for.

November 21, 2007 | Naomi Klein, Naomi Klein is the author of "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism."

The world saw a video last week of Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers using a Taser against a Polish man in the Vancouver International Airport in October. The man, Robert Dziekanski, died soon after the attack. In recent days, more details have come out about him. It turns out that the 40-year-old didn't just die after being shocked -- his life was marked by shock as well. Dziekanski was a young adult in 1989, when Poland began a grand experiment called "shock therapy" for the nation.

IT finally occurs to me, after 25 years, that I married Amelia Earhart. Hey, everybody, call off the search. She's right here, in the passenger seat next to me, trying to read a road map that she's holding upside down. Seriously, my wife is the greatest companion on a road trip -- patient, organized and lots of yuks -- yet she has no real sense of direction and cannot read a road map to save our lives. "Maybe we should take this blue highway," she says.